Fast Deformable Template Matching for Character Recognition in Scene Images

To recognize characters in scene images, a character segmentation method is generally required for pre-processing. However, there are problems that traditional methods are not able to segment “isolated character” which does not constitute a character string and “touching character” which is connected to other characters. Moreover, it is known that character images in scene images suffer from perspective distortion. In this paper, we propose a new fast character segmentation method of characters including the isolated and the touching ones with robustness for perspective distortion and character deformations. By applying the proposed method to scene images, it is confirmed that the method is robust against perspective distortion and character deformations, and the method is superior in computational time against a simple template matching method.